THE GREAT SOCIAL MEDIA CAR CRASH?

Once upon a time — in a time of great intellectual tribulation — I wrote an MA essay titled “is terrorism the accident of global mass media?” I recently dug up this old essay from the dusty archives to see what my young brain had conjured a year after the terrorist attacks of September 11.

The essay was not bad, I must admit. Not bad at all. It started with the following speculation:

This project begins with an accident.

Or rather, it begins with the playful idea that, perhaps — just
perhaps — the spectacular violence of terrorism we have seen on our TV-screens after the events of September 11 could be an accident of the global mass media. According to French philosopher Paul Virilio, every technology produces, provokes, programs a specific accident. For example, while the invention of a technology such as a car allows us to move quicker through space, it also simultaneously creates the possibility of the accident: a violent car crash. Virilio claims that, since Aristotle, the substance of any technology has been over-emphasized at the expense of its accident; that is to say, historically, the emphasis on the positive side of technology has overlooked its negative side-effects.

This essay then proceeded to carry out a philosophically-caffeinated analysis whereby— through the help of the likes of Virilio, Baudrillard and Deleuze — I formulated two hypotheses about what such an “accident” could look like. I paraphrase these here (and please do not mind the theoretical language du jour I used to impress those I thought knew better):

The first hypotheses concerned the relevance of speed. This looked at how quickly such events spread in the contemporary mass media causing the implosion of space and time by creating “a complex relationship between local involvements and interaction across distance.”

The second hypothesis concerned the relevance of simulation. This, in turn, looked at the difficulty of disentangling “real” facts from the mediated spectacles of their news coverage. In other words, through media events such as 911, I speculated, the global mass media gives “people involved in local struggles the possibility to stage events that transcend the local — simulations of the event whose primary purpose is to create a representation of that event that can be transmitted through global mass media.”

This essay finally concludes with a fancy argument where different kinds of media technologies (such as 24/7 live television) create new kinds of “information subjects” who are adept in exploiting the technologies’ inherent capabilities (like obsessive television live coverage of big explosions). So, a terrorist group, who wishes to cause a massive global disturbance to aid their cause, can thus exploit the global mass media’s thirst for such spectacles to design attacks that cause maximum coverage.

A phenomena we have perhaps seen since September 11 many times again?

But is this an accident?

Rape photos and lolcats

More than 10 years later — and with perhaps less need to impress any body— I thought about this quirky old essay when I was reading news about the spread of “fake” rape photos on social media forums.

The rape of white women seems to have become one of most popular the desire objects of the anti-immigrant right, who cannot seem to get enough of repeating gruesome stories of evil of foreigners raping “our” white women. Two recent media stories have added fuel to this explosive mix: the mass harassment of women in Cologne over New Years and the alleged coverup of such harassment in Sweden.

(In Finland there is also another developing story that has got the social media forums’ juices flowing. Here “liberal” women workers in asylum centres have allegedly paid young asylum seekers for sex, again, supposedly confirming the many fantasies about the sexual underpinnings behind especially female multicultural tolerance …)

In any case, a report in the French news site chronicles the use of some of the photos that have accompanied these rape fantasies circulating on anti-immigration forums. The article argues:

Dozens of photos and videos purporting to show young female victims of sexual assaults in Germany, Sweden and even Finland have been spreading like wildfire across social media. Although the women in the photos have bloodied faces, bruised bodies and petrified expressions, FRANCE 24’s Observers discovered that many of these pictures are actually fakes.

It turns out that — whatever the truth is behind the harassment — many of the alleged pictures used in these reports accusing the asylum seekers are not new. They have been in circulation on the internet for years, now re-appropriated for a new purpose given their suitability to make a point.

Thus, a picture of a bruised woman finds its eternal recurrence in new discussions that have absolutely nothing to do with the original.

But this photo has been circulating on the Internet for a while. Back in February 2015, the same photo was used by a controversial nationalist site called “Fdesouche” for an article titled “Sweden: Rape capital of the West”. ‘Fdesouche’ had already gone out of its way to establish a link between sexual violence and “foreigners”. But “Fdesouche” wasn’t even the first website to use the photo — it had already been posted online back in 2007 on a conspiracy blog that explored the same theme.

A process not that much unlike lol cats?

Is there an accident in the social media waiting to happen?

But in all seriousness (if there is a such a thing any more), this question of accidents is closely related to my ongoing explorations of the “dark side.” As a homage to my younger self, let me speculate here a bit:

1. If social media platforms facilitate certain kinds of negative affordances — such as the spread of fake rape news photos to inflame hatred— what can be done about this? In other words, if the dynamics of social media facilitates a certain kind of free-for-all viral spread of information, what should be done about this more unsavoury nature of contemporary social media?
2. And while this question ranks of simplistic technological determinism, it is by no means a frivolous one. When we look at the ongoing work on violent political extremism — and the broader debate on terrorist radicalisation that takes place online — there are indeed many arguments made where the “online” is somehow in fault: whether it is seen as a formative reason for terrorist radicalisation online; whether it is the loci of inspiration for lone wolf terrorists etc? As a consequence, thus, if the “online” is culpable, in whatever form, different methods also beed to be designed to counter this “online” component of violent extremism. And, as we see increasingly in public debates, this has to do with the growing requests for more policing and more surveillance online, that is, methods that foreground the online component of action over more preventive offline and community-based action?

So is viral hate speech the accident of social media? Do technologies facilitate such action and, if so, is the internet to blame? Or is there a middle ground we can think about?

(I have no answers but I did do my PhD thesis on this relationship between representation and difference in global information flows so perhaps something more to write about here next …”)